Wild turkeys precipitate international fowl play

Sisters isn’t the only place we’ve been where wild turkeys prowl.

We lived on farms in New Zealand for 18 years, where turkeys have no predators but man (and not many people want to eat a wild turkey). They were introduced decades ago, joining a long list of non-native species now present in New Zealand.

They’ve earned a reputation with farmers as pests. They consume and contaminate the green pastures that make New Zealand so distinctive. Their summer diet consists largely of grass and bugs, mainly crickets, which taint the meat. An old timer told us turkeys are more palatable if hunted in the months that don’t contain an ‘r,’ which would be the late fall and winter months in New Zealand — the months when there are no crickets.

There was one time we cut the turkeys some slack. We lived in an area with heavy clay soils and a summer drought brought great cracks to the surface of the pastures. Huge numbers of crickets emerged from the rifts and we could see the destruction as they ate their way through the grass. The turkeys came to the rescue, eating more crickets than grass, which allowed the pastures to recover.

There is no hunting season on turkeys in New Zealand and if they are on your farm, they’re yours to “manage” however you want. Occasionally, my husband would take our young sons out for a turkey hunt. This consisted of a daylight search of farm gates to see where the turkeys were perching, then sneaking up on them at night when they were asleep. A swift grab by my husband, a pounce by the boys on any that were sleepily trying to escape and a quick wring of the turkeys’ necks would net us dinner for the next day.

The first turkey the boys triumphantly presented was plucked and roasted in the traditional way. It was so tough it was inedible. We soon learned that the best way to enjoy wild turkey meat was to skin them, discard the legs and poach the breast, using the meat in a pie seasoned with lots of herbs and spices.

I don’t recall anyone being foolish enough to feed wild turkeys near their house, where they might decide to dine on the flowerbeds or vegetable gardens. In one instance, when our boys were very small, a thoughtless townie stopped on a country road and captured two chicks as pets for her children. When the chicks became large enough to tear up her lawn and mess up the sidewalks, she brought them out to us, acquaintances who lived on a farm and had plenty of animals.

A dog killed one turkey soon after its arrival. The other, who turned out to be a tom, went to live with our hens. We hoped he would bond with them, and stay near the hen house. But the turkey was too socialized to humans to do that and he proceeded to lead our hens astray, showing them how to fly over the garden fence and destroy my flowers and the freshly planted vegetables.

The end came when the tom, frustrated with our hens’ lack of response to his romantic overtures, attacked one of our sons. My husband was nearby with two young friends and his team of working dogs. The five dogs, two adolescent boys and one furious husband descended en masse upon the turkey. A frenzy of barking, yelling, gobbling and neck-wringing resulted very quickly in a dead turkey. That one, his breast tender from a grain and garden fed lifestyle, ended up on our Thanksgiving table.

After that trauma, I much prefer a wild turkey to stay that way, minding his own business and eating crickets.